Larvae are definitely a significant hindrance, and I think they've worked out quite well as a challenge. They've made a pretty big difference to how comfortably I can play through 2.1 Insane in particular.

Anyone been playing Deltarune? Undertale as a whole is quite overrated, but it's still a load of fun if you like bullet hell and Toby's style of humor. Personally, I just find it a relaxing game in general.

For an additional installment (or demo of one) it's done a good job of living up to its predecessor, along with adding some new features that stay true to the original design.

If there were a way to make a combo of self preservation and self repair, so the ants could go back to regen and then go to fight again with all their life because the only big problem of self repair is that if your ants are constantly fighting they won't regen at all

You are forced to take one of those abilities at a time unfortunately. You can't get both of them.

Currently, most AoE attacks used by the AI, particularly by DCHB (confusion spray), BTB (swinging jaws and stun), or BWS (venom strike), are aimed on whatever that creature is attacking at the time. This means they can easily, on accident, turn around to strike a single foe behind them, and waste their ability to do very little, when they could have killed or at least damaged 10-20 ants right next to them in a group. Because of this, I think it might be valuable to improve the targeting on these abilities, as well as all future AoE attacks.

Implementation:

This could be fairly simple to implement from an outsider perspective, and its accuracy could easily be based on how much lag such an addition would generate. While I expect you'll know more programming tricks than I do, it sounds as if this could be done with a very simple search that looks at positions across 360 degrees to see which target will hit the most enemies. For example, you could use a binary search to check for enemies in the 180 degrees to either the left and right or front and back of the creature, and then use that as the new target area (although this may be worse than sequential searches given one set of 180 degrees features a spread 6 foes while the opposite 180 degrees features a clumped 5 foes).

Interesting. Do you prefer it in the early-game, or the late-game? Mostly, I notice it seems to work against me when facing ubers or attack waves, as I'll suddenly have no black ants after the first couple start to die.

self-repair isn't actually good because it provides extra regen (although this does help if all other black ants die), it's primarily good because it's not self-preservation. If you took neither option, you'd be pretty well off, as it's better to have your black ants bravely die and make space for new ones than for them to all survive and die at one time, losing you all of your defensive units.

Personally, I might even avoid self-preservation until we've obtained the leaf cutter major.